Seven Notebooks: Poems

Interesting concept—McGrath supposedly kept seven distinct notebooks during this time, each seems to have a theme (e.g. Hurricane, Luxury, Dawn), he went through a haiku stage plus liberal quotes from other male poets, his obsession with Whitman and Neruda, his interactions with the world at large and his family on a smaller scale, observations from his son Jackson (Sam seems more distant, older?) and wife Elizabeth. Preferred the work where he circles around the same theme (like in the Bob Hope poem, circling capitalism and snowstorms) instead of the meandering loose tongued snippets from his life.

I think what I hate about this approach is that it makes it seem as if McGrath simply oozed into 7 different notebooks and clapped them shut and sent them off to the publisher, as if there were no editing involved. Words don’t fall perfectly from our brains onto the page.